Have you used the Linkage software? Was it useful but you didn’t think it was worth it to send me a pile of money? Please consider a simple $1 donation on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/rectorsquid). It won’t add up to more than $12 per year but it will still be a constant reminder to me to work don’t the software, especially the Mac version.

Speaking of the Mac version, I made some progress yesterday and today:

For a while, I had been writing a lot of code to calculate the convex hull from a set of points, something that is needed to make links look right. A convex hull is a polygon shape that includes all of the points on what would look like the “outside” of the link. Think of what happens when you have a triangle, a naturally convex shape, and you add a new point in the center between all of the other points; The original triangle is the convex hull with the new point being excluded from that polygon.

Anyhow, there are still some glitches, like the arrow locations on that angle measurement element, but it’s coming along. The next thing I’ll be doing is drawing “solid” links, which are those links that have an outline outside of the connector circles. A link that is slid in this way looks more like a real-world piece with holes drilled into it instead of just a polygon that connects all of the connectors.
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